September 2010 - April 2011
By the end of summer, I still wasn't much better. I was attempting to slog through life, but I wasn't having too much success. My full-time contracting job became a maybe-fifteen-hours-a-week contracting job because I still could not to sit up for more than a few hours a day. I started using the elliptical again, but could only manage about a mile a few days a week. I'd made a promise to my ballet teacher when I was a teenager that if she took the next ballet exam in the programme, I'd take the next one too, but there was no way I could spin or jump. Riding the Metro remained impossible, as even going the four stops to work made me so nauseous I'd have to get off the train. Six months later, no significant progress at normality.
The headaches continued. And they were spreading. Instead of being centrally located at one spot at the back left of my head, about three inches around from my left ear, the pain creeped down into my neck, into my shoulders, into my back. All the muscles in the area contracted and froze into place. I started looking as though I could have been the Hunchback. I had no range of motion in my neck. I couldn't pick up anything of any weight as that caused me to black out. Of course, the headaches kept coming, leaving me bedridden a few days a week; even when I wasn't bedridden, the pain was always there, throbbing away.
So back to the neurologist. Unfortunately, she had no more ideas than anyone else, and suggested that my body was still trying to cope with the damage from the CSF leak. She could only recommend continuing bedrest as much as possible, wearing a corset whenever I was upright to keep everything in place, and drinking as much water and caffeine as I could. The second two posed no issue; the first was becoming increasingly unpleasant, to say the least. One can only spend so much time in bed before going crazy, and by this point, it had been about eight months. I felt I'd watched every movie and television show I'd ever wanted to see. I'm not exactly the most social person, but I wanted to have the ability to go out and see people if I felt like it. It's mentally and physically and emotionally draining.
Back to the neurologist. She recommended starting a round of physical therapy to help loosen and calm down the muscles in my neck and back. She thought that there was so much damage to the base of my brain and the top of my spinal cord that the muscles had contracted in place to protect my brain and upper spinal cord. If the muscles were allowed to relax some, maybe those areas could rest and heal. So I started PT two days a week in December. I had exercises to do three times a day at home. I never felt that it helped, so I stopped going in March, I think.
By April, the headaches were mostly gone. I was still extremely aware of the pain - it twinged whenever I did any sort of physical exertion, I still couldn't lift anything more than about five pounds. I pushed my way through my ballet exam - because I said I would - and somehow passed. My memories from this time, too, are spotty. When the brain is so busy processing pain, few memories are processed into short-term and long-term memories.
But something had happened in December. On New Year's Eve, my college roommates dragged me to a party because they knew I needed to get out of the house for something. I knocked on the door, and the cutest guy I'd ever seen answered the door. He invited me in, and a giant cardboard stand-up of Boba Fett greeted me. I had no reason to think he would change everything.
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